Trying to avert the “tragedy” of “Baby Richard’s” being taken from his adoptive parents, Gov. Jim Edgar signed a bill Sunday that stresses a child’s best interests when a disputed adoption results in a custody hearing.
The bill, which went into effect when Edgar signed it at the Juvenile Protective Association’s North Side office in Chicago, was a rapid-fire response by the governor and General Assembly to the Illinois Supreme Court’s controversial Baby Richard ruling last month.
The court unanimously overturned two lower-court decisions to rule that 3 1/2-year-old Richard must be returned to his biological father, Otakar Kirchner of Chicago, whom he has never seen. The previous court rulings had found Kirchner to be an unfit father who had forfeited his parental rights.
In an unprecedented move for a governor, Edgar announced Wednesday his intentions to try to influence the Supreme Court’s decision after the fact. The Richard bill was quickly drafted and passed by the House on Thursday and the Senate on Friday.
Edgar said Sunday he believes the new legislation “will allow us to head off a tragedy and an outrage that could occur as a result” of the decision.
The bill reverses the long-standing policy of deeming parental rights the key factor in determining custody after an adoption is denied or revoked on appeal. In the Supreme Court decision, Justice James D. Heiple wrote, “Laws are designed to protect natural parents in their pre-emptive rights to their own children wholly apart from any consideration of the so-called best interests of the child.”
But now those “so-called” interests are to be considered “paramount.”
“I don’t think the first priority is the rights of the natural father,” Edgar said in a room packed with adoptive parents and their often-squealing toddlers. “I think the first priority has to be what is best for the 3 1/2-year-old child.”
He added that the bill is important for all adopted children because the Supreme Court decision created a “chill” among adoptive parents.
Edgar is still calling on the Supreme Court to reverse itself on the basis of not having taken the lower courts’ findings into adequate consideration. He said his office plans to petition the court this week. Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy also asked the court Friday to reconsider its ruling.
Edgar added that the new law provides the court with “another option” if it resists pulling an about-face.
“I think we all think the Supreme Court decision was wrong. That doesn’t mean the Supreme Court will listen to us,” the governor said. “But this legislation now provides for a mechanism for them to amend their decision and at least allow this (custody) hearing to be held, which we think would give the adoptive parents the opportunity to show that they should retain custody.”
Otakar Kirchner is now married to Richard’s biological mother, Daniella Kirchner, who, after an argument with then-boyfriend Otakar, put the baby up for adoption and told the father he was dead. The couple later reconciled and wed, and Kirchner began working to win custody of the child.
One of the key lower-court findings was that Kirchner had forfeited his parental rights by not showing interest in his child during the first 30 days of his life. Kirchner claimed he did not know the child was alive and had looked through his wife’s garbage cans for evidence of a living baby.
The new bill tries to prevent similar situations by establishing a registry for unmarried fathers to stake their parental rights with the Department of Children and Family Services.
“It shifts the burden more to an unmarried father to come forward and act promptly or he will lose the opportunity to be a parent to the child,” said Chicago Bar Association member Shelley Bostick, who helped draft the bill.
The legislation also moves to keep cases from dragging through the court system for years. It makes adoption proceedings a priority among civil cases and reduces from two years to one the window for biological parents to contest court-approved adoptions.
There was certainly nothing slow-moving about the governor’s and legislature’s actions this past week. Edgar attributed the legislature’s speediness to a widespread sense of urgency, and he denied that election-year politics may have played a role.
“If we had not tried to do something to save this child from what I think could be a tragedy the child maybe could never overcome, I think we would have been held derelict in our duty,” he said.
